Through A Lantirn Darkly

October 30, 1985|By Blue

One night Air Force F-16s based in West Germany may streak to stop an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops. The pilots' ability to see and destroy tanks will depend on Lantirn, a troubled system made in Orlando by Martin Marietta. The system's 5-year history is riddled with reasons to worry that this ultimate test won't go as well as it should.

Indeed, Lantirn is a textbook example of how the Pentagon buys too little military strength while spending too much money. As a series of stories in The Orlando Sentinel this week showed, the classic Lantirn is a snafu with all the ingredients: rivalry between military branches, government laxity toward the contractor, swollen costs and congressional meddling.

The basic question that the Air Force hasn't answered convincingly is why it chose the Martin Marietta system instead of having Ford Aerospace modify the targeting system it makes for the Navy's F-18. That's what the original Air Force planners wanted to do. The Ford system would have been lighter, less detectable and less expensive. And large numbers of them probably would have been ready sooner than Martin's target year of 1990.

The official explanation is that Lantirn promised to do more. It promised to recognize targets and automatically fire missiles against them -- a technology that is still being developed and that some critics say won't be ready for years. But there's another factor: Like the Navy and Army, the Air Force doesn't like to use a system that another branch developed.

To have its own, more complex system, the Air Force accepted some trade- offs. It accepted a design that saddled F-16s with five times the drag that had been planned -- hurting the planes' maneuverability. Lantirn weighs 950 pounds -- 200 pounds more than was specified in Martin's proposal -- and that's with empty space where the automatic targeting equipment is supposed to go. And the Air Force chose a system whose per-plane cost -- including research, development and production -- now has doubled to $6 million.

Congress nearly applied a reasonable test to this project in 1982. It passed a requirement that no more money be spent until Lantirn was tested against a modified version of the Ford system. But Florida Sen. Lawton Chiles pushed through an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that killed the competition.

In the ongoing Lantirn tale, no single party wears the black hat. Indeed, it may prove to be a potent weapon someday on the firing line. But right now, the evidence suggests that the Air Force ignored and -- with help on Capitol Hill -- continued to ignore a better military option. Such policies, repeated again and again, weaken America's defense.